Ebay sure is funny at times

If you follow this blog you know I keep a weather eye open for potential 15mm ships becoming available at a reasonable price. So it’s safe to say that if something from Old Glory Shipyards (ex Merrimack Miniatures) shows up on ebay, I’ll probably be somewhat interested. When I saw this pair of ships come available, I jumped at the opportunity to bid– especially at a starting bid of 8.50 each.

Monitor with single turret, 15mm, ACW era.

6 Gun Casemate, probably the CSS Virginia

I could use these– ACW is a little late for Big Danged Boats but I could kit bash them to look a little more primitive.

Now, I was all in when this was 8.50, and bid for both of them at that price. Then I got notice two days before the deadline that someone else was bidding. So I counter-bid, not very aggressively, just driving the price up a couple bucks. I wasn’t really interested in capturing the item definitively, just serving notice that I was interested and not going to quit. The real action would happen in the last 30 minutes of the auction. So I set an alarm on my phone and it beeped me in time to bid again before closing. Rapid counter-bid. I bid again. Rapid counter-bid. So I waited. Then bid again five minutes out. The counter-bid came again, this time in an amount that was much larger. At this point the asking price was getting up there, and I did a short look up on both ships. They could be purchased brand new for much cheaper than the auction price. At this point, I stopped bidding, but both ships went for more than ten dollars over the highest bid I was willing to pay.

Okay, fine, you keep those, says I. I didnt’ expect either of these to go for more than about 18 dollars, but people surprise me. That’s how ebay works, compulsion and the fear that you are missing out on something the next guy is getting. Once you start disciplining yourself, Ebay becomes a lot easier.

4 responses to “Ebay sure is funny at times”

If there’s no lower price alternative available, that certainly holds true. But common sense would dictate that these items might be available new and one google search would have revealed where to find them. Wait. I just used the phrase *common sense*. Never mind.

Back when eBay was A Thing for me, I used a great website called eSnipe. For a really low price, you tell it how much you want to bid, maximum, for an auction. It logs in to eBay for you, thirty seconds or so before the auction ends, and bids up incrementally to your maximum price. For me it was great to just ‘fire and forget’ and not get caught up trying to ‘win out’ some other bidder.

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